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| Look closely and you'll see Death running past. |
Yesterday Death ran right past me. I don’t mean
that metaphorically, though courtesy of my current mind state I am in the midst
of one of those heightened-awareness-thus-metaphors-everywhere
phases. In this case though, death was a solid object in the form of a young
man in jogging shorts and shoes and machine-knit cap, this ensemble completed
by a sports jersey stamped DEATH big and bold across the back.
I was in the car, heading into the drive-through
of my stupid credit union, where momentarily a college girl with a Madonna
headset would appear on a dark little TV screen and say, without looking at the
camera, “So we are making a deposit
today?” and I, forever annoyed by bank workers in general and my credit union’s
stupid little TV screens in particular, would take the bait and say, “Actually I am making a deposit today.” But first,
before all that, I got a load of death, jogging by, as if straight out of a
Kids in the Hall skit.
I laughed. How can you not when death jogs by
and keeps going?
I debated going for my phone, to snap Death’s
picture. In the seconds that debate took, I think I thought about how I need to
stop taking pictures of everything. But then I think I thought about how no,
this time it really was so funny I just had to capture and share. And back and
forth like that until I pulled on the phone charger and fished out the phone
from its hiding spot and snapped an image so small as Death receded that
possibly, even with this “proof,” no one would believe me anyway.
Death. Running away from me. Like my thoughts.
Running away from me. Like a forty-hour argument compressed into ten seconds,
debating something so small, giving it so much weight, like ten dental x-ray
aprons heaped on top. This
is your brain. This is your brain on PTSD. Welcome to my world and people, let
me tell you bout it, it’s so much not fun. This Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
bullshit, she is a fucking bitch from hell.
Forty-nine
years ago, nearly to the day, I arrived on the planet. The first gift I was
given was a very long French name by a man who was supposed to love me but who
would spend the next forty-four years not loving me, often hating me, until he
died and they put him in a box in the ground at which point I could finally, at
least occasionally, begin to exhale.
I
understand a little better— now that I have spent decades exploring my own
demons and fragile-chemistry-included brain that came standard-equipped with
very inconvenient albeit sometimes very exciting short-wiring— that there were
problems there, in my father’s mind. And in the end, these manifested and
presented undeniably in the form of Alzheimer’s, and not that variety you read
about where some grizzly old curmudgeon morphs into a fluffy little kitten. But
long, long before that, there were problems. Passed along to me. Taken out on me.
Eighteen years until I got away.
You’re stupid. You’re
going to hell. You’re awful. You’re going to hell. You’re worthless. You’re
going to hell.
Legacy.
Something is broken in my mind. This is less dramatic than it might sound at
first. Think about it like this: If I tell you, or better yet if you hear
behind my back, that I have a “mental illness,” then maybe this sounds exotic
or worthy of pity or judgment or concern. Now imagine I tell you I have come
down with a cold. Less exciting. Maybe you give me a little sympathy, a box of
Kleenex, a pot of soup. Then we move along to the next topic. After a week or
two I stop producing green snot and coughing into my elbow. All better til the
next time.
Okay,
the truth is that green snot is entirely more manageable than the stream of
thoughts that comes pouring in when a trigger is pulled. But the catch is, and
this I have learned from too much practice, is to treat an episode like a flu.
Better yet, like food poisoning. Have you ever had food poisoning? Did you say to
yourself and others, I’m going to die
or I wish I were dead? You’re allowed
to say that when your body is cramped over and leaking shit and puke
everywhere. Perfectly acceptable Everyone knows the food poisoning will pass,
you’ll be glad to be alive again.
Work
with me here. PTSD is like food poisoning of the mind. Most of the time I have
no symptoms. I am “in remission.” There are a few constant lingering traits
that seem unshakeable, but they are relatively harmless, and with some
redirection they can even be helpful. For instance, I am hyper-vigilant. A door
opens, my head swings around to assess potential danger. I know what’s going on
all the time, everywhere. This attention to detail is useful to a writer. Related:
I know how to read people, to see if they are emitting rage, and if that rage
will harm me. This attention to emotion is useful in cultivating compassion for
others. I am so empathic at times that it hurts (emotional pun intended).
Also
for instance— a little OCD. Okay, maybe more than a little. But we can do
things with OCD. We can knit scarves and hats and sweaters and socks and
mittens and handcuffs and leg warmers and the list goes on.
The
exaggerated startle response is harder to reframe but I have come to look at it
as an opportunity for my loved ones to show their love. My son and my partner
will whistle or phone ahead to let me know they are crossing a room behind me
even (especially) if they are just a few feet away. This let’s me know they
understand I need warning. It let’s me know they love me and want to be part of
my feeling safe. And it let’s me know that they know that my martial arts
training might just land them a head punch if they don’t let me know. So there,
that’s an upside.
Decembers
are almost always hard. When I can, I leave the country. Something about being
where I can’t speak the language makes the month less hard. Whereas something
about being here, where I can hear everyone blather on about the holidays and
plans to be with family, all this combined with the short days and stretching
darkness? Well these are the fixings for a Perfect Storm. Because feeling
unsafe is a trigger and I cannot think of a place I felt more reliably unsafe
than as a child in my father’s house at Christmas. Terror. Pure terror. Year
after year after year after year.
Get over it, people say. These
people do not understand the basic mechanics of conditioned response.
The
Seasonal Affective Disorder is bad enough. Darkness descends. Wide swings open
the door of a parade of thoughts about how peaceful being dead must be. Strong
is the urge to share these thoughts, but technically that is taboo and even a
taboo buster likes me knows I better couch the description in, “This isn’t a
cry for help.” And it’s not a cry for help. It is me saying, or trying to say,
“Now here’s something weird. I have spent a bazillion hours working to heal,
and there is a very rational part of my brain that knows how very much I love
being alive, but godfuckingdammitmotherfucker, there is a gas leak in here
that’s telling me I don’t love being alive. Does anybody else smell that?”
So
I ask for help. Help shows up. I officially have so many tools in my mental
health kit, and such a ridiculous number of friends, and so many practices to
turn to— yoga, meditation, walking-induced endorphins, MDT (multiple dog
therapy)— that I have come to navigate the SAD if not with aplomb then at least
with a sort of wobbly grace.
But
here’s where it got tricky in 2012. Some people I know did something they
shouldn’t have. The shouldn’t have they did upset me in an understandable way.
Unfortunately, it also upset me in a non-understandable way. An irrational way.
To the uninitiated, we might identify this as “overreaction.” But my PTSD kin
know there is another term.
Flashback.
 |
| Just Happy to Be Here. |
Here,
let us turn to my dog Dante for help understanding. Dante is a
Labrador-polar-bear hybrid. He weighs maybe 120 and is cheerful as can be 97%
of the time. I don’t know his back story. I got him from the pound when he was
on death row. The story they told me was that he was seven, aggressive with
cats, not housebroken, a constant barker. I got him home and he displayed the energy of a two-year-old, was afraid of
the cat, so housebroken the other dogs started shitting outside regularly
thanks to his role modeling, and he refused to bark for the first two months.
(Not to mention we had to struggle mightily to get him to understand that
sleeping on the furniture is mandatory.)
Henry,
upon hearing that Dante was moments from death before I rescued him, and upon
observing Dante’s near constant grin, gave Dante a motto: Just Happy to Be
Here. It suits him perfectly.
But
here’s the thing about Dante. The minute he hears thunder, he turns into a
cartoon character. You know the cartoon I’m thinking of— when the gigantic guy
sees a mouse and screams and leaps into the arms of the little guy? One thunder
rumble and Dante comes undone, hurls himself on the bed, tries to curl up to
pug puppy size, and trembles and pants. No amount of soothing helps.
Technically he can see that here we are, we are safe, it’s all good. But on
some cellular level he is tuned in to some place far away where the thunder is
out to get him and there is no coming back soon. Gotta wait it out.
So
it goes with the flashbacks. When the someones did the something that set me
off, they did not set out to act with malice. They were just horsing around.
What they did remains wrong. But my caught-in-the-crossfire response caught
everyone off guard.
Just get over it seemed to be the
consensus, at least to my suspicious mind. Ah, another trigger. To say, “I am hurt” and to be told, or perceive you are being told, “No you’re
not.”
I
could see the walls around me. A little voice said, “Look, we’re safe— we are,
really.” But there was no silencing the thunder in my brain. The Thing was
coming for me. I could feel it. It was out there. No escape.
I
spent the better part of the last month in bed crying, in a fog waiting for the
thunder’s echo to recede. You can’t rush a cold out the door, you can’t unpull
a trigger. You also can’t – unless you’re Brian Wilson or someone with that
kind of money— really just stay in bed indefinitely like that. So I would, as
needed, suit up and show up, perform weddings, brush teeth, take whatever
client meetings I couldn’t postpone. To the untrained eye I was just me.
Waterworks carefully turned off as needed, faucets reopened to full blast as
soon as possible.
There
is a deep frustration that comes with PTSD and, I imagine, with any mental
disorder that doesn’t totally obliterate our awareness. I know this thing
inside and out. It bores me. I hate it. I am not entertained by it. I do not
enjoy the attention it calls to me. I have studied long and hard to learn how
to confine it as much as it can be confined. I do not invite it in. I strive to
make boundaries clear and spaces safe to keep the storms at bay. In the past it
has prompted agoraphobia. Now it just inspires a lot of introversion. The less
you put yourself out there, the better the odds of avoiding the triggers. This
is not mere theory. This is truth.
Sometimes,
though, triggers come through the front door, the computer screen, the phone
line. Sometimes you can hide but you cannot run.
The
last time it got this bad was a long time ago. Six years in fact, when I was in a very
bad marriage, part of cycle I’d started years before. PTSDers have a tendency
to reinjure. Not consciously even. In that marriage I accidentally but near
perfectly emulated my family of origin issues. The thunder rumbled. I fell
apart, I wished I were dead. I cried for six months straight.
But
even then there were the good parts. I learned about the miracle of modern
medicine and its ability to ease the panic. I learned alternate modalities. I
engaged in therapy so intense I came to refer to it as Emo Chemo. I got my shit
together. I did not grow smug. When life twists your balls that hard, you don’t have to worry about smug knocking on the door. Ever.
In
the midst of all that, I used to sit in the backyard and chain smoke and chain
cry and all I could think about was what a shit my then-husband was and how
much he hurt me. I wasn’t yet at the part where I understood how very much like
that original hurter he was. I hadn’t yet come to clearly know that I wasn’t
just afraid of the thunder in the here and now. I was answering to that distant
thunder, booming from 40-odd dark years away.
Then
one day, it was only for a few seconds, I heard something. A bird singing. This
was, I swear, the most profound sound I ever heard. Fleeting, yes. But for that
moment I was in the moment and I was aware that I was in the moment and this
gave me so much joy. That was not an instant end to the pain, which took years
to ebb, but it was a start.
I
was thinking about birds this past week. At the craft store the other day,
despite my 2013 resolution to avoid impulse buys, I just had to get Dante this robin
red breast toy that, when squeezed, emits realistic birdsong. I stood in the
store riveted by it, squeezing it again and again, remembering that moment in
my backyard so many years before.
Then
I got an email from my yoga teacher, a follow-up to an email from the day
before telling me that Bob had died. Bob, whom I first met in yoga a dozen
years ago, who used to drive me nuts the way he rushed in to claim “his space.”
Bob whom I came to appreciate so much. Bob, who told us at the end of class a
few months back that he had Stage IV cancer. Bob, whom I saw at a yoga party
three weeks ago, who kept going to yoga through his pain and his treatments.
And he said to me, who’d disappeared from class, “When are you coming back?”
January I lied. Well, maybe not lied, but I didn’t know if that was true.
The
follow up email included a Chinese proverb Bob loved: "Keep a green tree in
your heart and perhaps a songbird will come."
Ha. The proverb is the songbird,
Bob, can you hear me?
Occasional bouts of brutal,
crippling depression and PTSD flashbacks notwithstanding, I’m stepping into the
50th year of my life tripping over an embarrassment of riches. Among
these: semi-regular trips to the spa, where I am invited to spend personal
quiet healing time in exchange for the classes I teach here. In addition to the
amazing hot tub, I also meet amazing people. Toward that end, on the first of
the year, when I had suited up and shown up and turned off the leaky eye faucet
long enough to lead a session on the healing powers of journaling, especially
during trauma, I just so happened to meet an attendee who is a psychiatrist
specializing in trauma. He, in turn, shared with me a soon to be published work
that contained clues for me.
The clues prompted epiphany, which
was extra nice since we’re in the season of the Feast of the Epiphany. I shared
the epiphany with Warren, who was, frankly, fucking exhausted from taking care
of me. He connected with a particular suggestion in the paper. So the next time
I started talking about the thunder, instead of saying to me, “Shhh, you know
the thunder can’t get you,” which only serves to make it worse, he listened to
the thunder with me. And when he listened to the thunder, I calmed down.
“Will you tell me I’m safe?” I
asked.
He held me and said, “You’re as safe
as the smallest nesting doll.”
And now, more tears, but the good
kind.
And then—is this thing on? check,
one, two, check… did you hear me when I said embarrassment of riches? And then
I spirited myself away to the spa again to hole up and hot tub and lavender
soak and smell aromatherapy and resume my yoga practice, thinking of my promise
to Bob.
There were those metaphors I
mentioned way back in the beginning. In the steam room I sat in a fog and I
thought: Look at this—I am in a fog and I
am in a fog! And then, the next day, swimming laps in a heated pool in the
cold air, I saw steam rising and I thought: Look
at this—the fog is lifting!
Of course there was a dream—aren’t
there always dreams at moments like this? I dreamed, I think, that Warren was
moving me to another house, but he hadn’t asked me, he just started packing us
up to go. And I couldn’t find my phone. Or my glasses. Easy enough, right? Fear
of loss of vision, loss of communication. The house, they say, represents the
body. Is it time to move into something else? Is Warren here to help?
It is. He is. And I am reminded of a
line from the Mark Strand poem Keeping
Things Whole, which Henry’s dad introduced me to more than half our
lifetimes ago, before Henry even. I move
to keep things whole.
Dante is an old dog. He learned a
new trick. He still fears the thunder but he no longer fears the couch, sprawls
upon it pornographically, super chill, spread eagle, just happy to be here.
There is more thunder for me, I know. But there are new tricks, too, I think. The
fog lifts. Soon I will see them.
Meanwhile, Death runs past me
cheerily, doesn’t even bother to look back, won’t even slow down for a picture.
It’s all coming back to me: I am safe now. I am just happy to be here.
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